The Marxist Threat to Nicaragua St.

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92 July 10, 1979 THE MARXIST THREAT TO NICARAGUA INTRODUCTION
The bloody conflict in the Central American nation of I Nicaragua
appears to have shattered President Carter's confident hopes that
the U.S. Senate ratification of the Panama Canal Treaties last year
would pave the way for an era of peaceful and neighbors questions
concerning not only U.S. Latin American policy, but also
U.S.-Soviet relations. O n e needs to examine carefully such things
as the part that Panama is reportedly playing in the Nicaraguan
conflict and whether it violates the Neutrality Treaty ratified by
the U.S. Senate last year. harmonious relations between the United
States and its H i spanic I The current fighting in Nicaragua
raises a broad range of Does Cuba's reported involvement in
Nicaragua, in partner ship with'panama, raise the clear implication
of a sub rosa role of the Soviets Does such a Soviet-Cuban role
portend the repetiti on of their successful military-political
alliance in Africa, and thus represent a clear challenge to the
Carter Administration on its own doorstep?

What would be the strategic consequences of a Marxist Nicaragua
both for the United States and for the entire Central American
region and the future of the U.S. use of the Panama Canal for
transit of its trade and oil?

What part did the Carter Administration's human rights campaign
play in fueling the bloody fighting in Nicaragua 3 Panamanians. In
June of 1976, a Soviet delegation arrived in Panama and concluded
major economic agreements.

Eldon Rudd (R-Ariz.) told the House of Representatives that the
U.S. State Department confirmed for him that they were aware of the
agreements Congressman President Carter's Canal Treaties When
newly-elected President Carter made public the twin Panama Canal
Treaties in 1977, critics of Torrijos in the Congress maintained,
without any hard information, that the Panamanian dictator was an
unreliable partner who would do with t h e vital U.S.-built
waterway what Egypt's Nasser did with the Suez Canal after he
seized it in 1956: use it as a weapon to the strategic disadvantage
of the United States and for the benefit of the Soviet Union and
its Socialist allies. However, it was not until June 6, 1979, that
authoritative testimony emerged in public to support this claim In
testimony before the House Subcommittee on the Panama Canal, Lt.
General Gordon Sumner, Jr Chairman of the Inter American Defense
Board until his retirement in May of 1978 reported on a two-hour
personal meeting with Torrijos in November 1977 prior to the U.S.
Senate debate on ratification of the Panama Canal treaties. The
Panamanian leader told him that he planned to support violent
insurrection and rebellion in th e Central American region despite
the fact that he had initialed the Neutrality Treaty pledging
Panama would not interfere in the affairs of other nations. General
Sumner also revealed in his House testimony that Torrijos defended
the Marxist Sandinistas s e eking to overthrow a fellow member of
the Inter-American Defense Board, President Anastasio Somoza of
Nicaragua. The former high-ranking U.S. officer forwarded a memo
containing the substance of his discussion with Torrijos and later
discussed it in perso n with General George Brown, then Chairman of
the Joint Chiefs of Departments. The substance of General Sumnerls
information was never revealed during the Senate debate on the
Panama Canal in Staff, and responsible officials in b'oth the State
and Defense 1978.

The day after General Sumner's revelation, officials of the U.S.
State Department were unable or unwilling to answer ques tions put
to them by members of the House Subcommittee concerning indictments
in Miami, Florida, in May 1979 of Panamanian natio nals and members
of Torrijos' intelligence staff, charged with smuggl ing arms and
ammunition to the Nicaraguan Sandinistas. U.S officials were quoted
by the Associated Press on June 7, 1979, as admitting that a gun
shipment from the United States did end up in Nicaragua via Panama,
but the State Department said it had no evidence Panama was arming
the revolution in Nicaragua. On June 27, 1979, the Chicago Tribune
published what it claimed were excerpts from a confidential State
Department paper of May 2, ,I 4 1979, asserting that there was hard
evidence that the Cubans were shipping arms to the Sandinistas on
Panamanian air force planes.

The Associated.Press and the United Press International reported
on June 28, 1979, that the U.S. State Department confir med exist
ence of the memo, but insisted it was not a State Department report
but a CIA intelligence document. On June 30, 1979, the se'cretary
to President Somoza, Max Kelly, charged in an interview with the
Associated Press in Managua, Nicaragua, that t h e Carter
Administration has known about the Cuban and Panamanian involve
ment for some time, but.had suppressed the information from the
news media and members of Congress fearing it would effect House
passage of enabling legislation for the Panama Canal Treaties.

State Department spokesman Hodding Carter was quoted by the
Reuters news service, published in the November 29, 1978 edition of
the New York Times, that State had taken up reports with Cuba and
other Latin governments that such countries were hel ping to
provide material military support to the Nicaraguan
Sandinistas.

However, on June 7, 1979, the same Hodding Carter told reporters
that the fate of the Panama Canal treaties should not be linked to
fighting in Nicaragua because the situation in tha t Central
American nation stood on its own two feet. At the same time, the
State Department released a 16-page report of alleged violations of
human rights in Nicaragua. The State Department, however ignored a
May 1, 1979, Manifesto by the Panamanian Agra rian Labor Party
pointing out that despite General Torrijos' pledge to re-establish
human rights and dgmocracy if the treaties were approved, he had
failed to honor that pledge.

Army's Southern Command based in Panama, told the same subcommit
tee that hear d General Sumner that the Torrijos government had
permitted formation of a brigade of Panamanians to fight in
Nicaragua with the Sandinistas, but their involvement appeared
directed more against the Somoza regime than advancement of the
Sandinista cause. M acAuliffe also told the subcommittee, accord
ing to the Associated Press of June 7, 1979, that Panamanians were
supplying weapons to the Sandinistas, but he refused to implicate
the Panamanian government. On June 26, 1979, New York Times
correspondent War r en Hoge wrote from the Sandinistas' side in
southern Nicaragua that many Panamanians were fighting with the
guerrillas and quoted one Panamanian as saying that of his
guerrilla training class of 124, 56 were Panamanians Lt. General
Dennis P. MacAuliffe, C o mmander in Chief of the Cuba-Central
American Connection Cuban designs on Panama and Nicaragua date back
to the first few months after Castro seized power in January.1959,
according to the former U.S. Ambassador to Panama, Joseph Farland.
Farland resigned his post in late 1963 and told a newspaper
interviewer in the wake of the Castro-inspired Panamanian riots in
January 1964 that his superiors at the U.S. State Department were
told of 5 Castro's plans to wrest the Panama Canal away from the
United States. Castro, according to Farland, had helped train and
equip the ill-fated guerrilla groups sent against Nicaragua and
Panama in the spring of 19

59. The Secretary of State at the time of the Panamanian riots,
Dean Rusk, told ABC-TV's IIIssues Answers1 program on January 12,
1964, that Castro agents played a signifi cant part in the Canal
disorders.

Later, at a January 15, 1964, press conference, then-Deputy
Secretary of Defense Cyrus Vance stated that Castro agents trained
in Cuba were responsible for increa sing the violence. Both Rusk
and Vance played important roles in the negotiations that led to
turning the Canal over to the Panamanian dictator Omar
Torrijos.

Dr. Roger Fontaine,'Director of Latin American Studies at
Georgetown University's Center for Sta tegic Studies, maintained in
an interview for Mutual Broadcasting on June 5, 1979 that Castro
has provided support to the Sandinista guerrillas for almost two
decades, both with training and weapons. The Sandinis tas deny
this, insisting that they have no t received Castrols help since
19

74. The Nicaraguans maintain that ever since they agr eed to
allow the United States to use their country as a staging area for
training Cuban exiles to launch the abortive Bay of Pigs invasion
of Cuba in April 1961, Castro has maintained both a personal and an
ideological-strategic reason to seek the overth row of the
staunchly anti-Marxist Nicaraguan regime.

The Chairman of the House Merchant Marine and Fisheries
Committee, Representative John Murphy (D-N.Y maintains that Castro
has always been the base of support for the Sandinistas.

With the advent of the Carter Administration in 1977, U.S.
policy changed in Latin America, favoring left wing and Marxist
regimes in an effort to court the Third World nations that look
with favor and admiration on Castro I I When the May 1979
Sandinista final' offensive" was launched Murphy spoke at a
symposium on Central America in Washington insisting that Castro
had sent 200 Cubans to Panama in a Russian built transport. They
later made their way to Costa Rica to join Panamanians and other
Latin nationals to fight with the Sandinistas although the
allegation was denied by the Sandinistas.

I However, in a complete reversal, the Carter Administration is
quoted by the New York Times on June 23, 1979, that Cuba was as
Murphy insisted, engaged in supplying arms and training inst ruc
tors to the Sandinistas. The Times quoted officials as saying that
Castro's involvement represented the most active role Cuba has
played in Latin America in 15 years. On June 24, 1979 Defense
Secretary Harold Brown said on ''Issues Answers" that the A d
ministration possessed strong evidence of Cuban military support. A
day earlier the Times quoted one high-ranking Adminis tration
official as saying that there was. even some evidence to suggest
that Cuban units, numbering a dozen, were actively taking I I part
in the fighting with the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. 6 SUmm In fact,
President Carter, on his return from t-SALT I1 signing with the
Soviets, told a jo the Vienna nt session of Congress and the
American people watching on nationwide television I made it clear
to President Brezhnev that Cuban military activities in Africa,
supported by the Soviet Union, and the growing Cuban involvement in
the problems of Central America and the Caribbean, can only have a
negative impact on U.S.

Soviet relations.

While the president's point may be debated, a Central Intelli
gence Agency report of May 2, 1979 clearly suggests Cuban bnvolve
ment, however low in profile, not only in Nicaragua, but throughout
Central America. The Cubans obviously possess a clear understand
ing of the strategic gains to be achieved in toppling the Somoza
regime. The report, which the State Department acknowledged it had
read, but refused to discuss, also reveals that Castro counseled
the Sandinistas to hide their Marxist beliefs in order to gain the
cooperation of non-Marxist groups-opposed to Somoza.

However, during the period prior to the May-June 1979 Sandinista
offensive, the U.S. news media were quoting leaders of the Sandi
nistas as insisting that they were not receiving help from Cuba nor
were they Marxist, and that the charges were a scare tactic of
conservatives in the U.S. Congress.

The Soviets and Sandinistas i'n Costa Rica Ray Holton of the
Phildelphia Inquirer wrote from San Jose Costa Rica on June 26,
1979, that the Sandinistas would not have been able to challenge
the Somoza regime militarily without the use of neighboring Costa
Rica, squeezed between Panama in the South and Nicaragua to the
North, as a sanctuary from which to launch raids into Nicaragua.
Holton quoted an unnam ed Costa Rican official as saying that while
his country had not aided the Sandinistas, his people favor the
overthrow of the Somoza regime.

In late 1978 the Costa Rican government broke diplomatic rela
tions after Nicaraguan troops violated its air space and ter ritory
in hot pursuit of the Sandinistas. However, the fiction of Costa
Rican neutrality ended when, following the lead of Panama, it
recognized a provisional government declared by the Sandinistas on
June 24, 19

79. Five days later, New York Time s correspondent Warren Hoge
stated flatly that Costa Rica was actively aiding the Sandinistas
and was just as active in seeking to hide its involvement in the
campaign to overthrow Somoza. The President of Nicaragua maintained
in a Reporter's Roundup News interview with the Mutual Network on
July 1, 1979, that when Mrs.

Rosalynn Carter visited Costa Rica in early 1977, Robert Pastor
on the National Security Council staff told Costa Rican officials
that the U.S. planned to try and overthrow him.

Nicaragua began slowly after the Soviet Union scored a major 7
Costa Rica's part in helping to fuel the bloody fighting in I I 7
breakthrough in Central America when it was allowed to establish an
Embassy in San Jose in 1972, two years before the first active
campa ign of ter.rorism in Nicaragua by the Sandinistas.

Since 1972 the Soviet presence has grown to almost 300
diplomatic personnel, out of proportion to the commercial busi ness
the Russians might conduct with Costa Rica, whose main crop is
coffee. The Russian diplomatic mission consists of a large embassy
residence a five-story "trade center" with sophisticated electronic
antennas on its roof and a cultural center that even Costa Rican
officials worry is used to recruit and process radical Costa Rican
student s sent off to the Soviet Union and Eastern European
countries for training.

Luis Pallais, editor and publisher of Managua's daily news paper
Novedades, maintained at a symposium sponsored by the Council on
Inter-American Security last May, that the Soviet Embassy in Costa
Rica has been ignored by both the U.S. news media and the U.S.
State Department,although it is an important component in the
Soviet offensive against the soft underbelly of the United States:
that is, Central Ame r ica. The national editor of the respected
Costa Rican daily La Nacion, Eduardo Ulibarri reluctantly agreed
with Pallais on the danger of the Soviet diplomatic mission in his
country, insisting at the same time that he favored the ouster of
Somoza and the replacement of the regime with a democratic
non-communist alternative stated, however, that he was aware of the
danger that, should the Sandinistas suceed in installing a Marxist
dictatorship in Nicaragua it would destablize the entire
region.

The second v ice president of Costa Rica, Jose Miquel Alfaro
said in an interview with Mutual Broadcasting on September 20 1978,
that the Soviet diplomatic mission has meddled in the internal
political affairs of his country and that his government and a
majority of t h e Costa Rican people deeply resent both the
interference and the presence of the Soviets, inherited from a
previous and more left-leaning government. President Somoza, in a
Mutual Broadcasting interview on January 22, 1978, insisted that
the Soviet Embass y is a command post for the Soviets to
co-ordinate the penetration, subversion and takeover of all Central
American.countries from Panama in the South to Guatemala Ulibarri
in the North Costa Rica, which does not maintain a substantial
defense force, has, s ince Torrijos seized power in Panama, come
under increasing pressure from this pro-Marxist dictatorship to its
South. This, combined with the considerable Soviet presence in
Costa Rica, may explain why San Jose has looked the other way and
allowed its cou n try to be used as a staging area for the growing
Sandinista guerrilla campaign from San Jose (July 3, 1979), reports
that everyone but the Barbara Koeppel of the Christian Science
Monitor, writing 8 government acknowledges that officials look the
other wa y when troops and arms are sent into Nicaragua. She also
reveals that the Costa Rican government has spent $3.5 million to
treat the Sandinista wounded in Costa Rican hospitals, and to
provide food clothing, and medical care for refugees fleeing the
fighti ng.

Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of the Soviet diplomatic
mission in San Jose is the total lack of attention given to it by
the U.S. news media, and the fact it was completely ignored during
the 1978 Senate debates on the Panama Canal. Costa Rica pro vided
the Soviets the opportunity for easy access to Panama and every
other Central American nation within a matter of hours.

A Marxist or anti-American Nicaragua would assure both Panama
and the Soviets it would not be challenged by a hostile nation nort
h of the Panama Canal while at the same time denying the United
States a strategic option for the construction of a second inter
national waterway or a trans-Nicaraguan oil pipeline to handle U.S.
crude oil from Alaska. Nicaragua was the nation originally
designated by U.S. Army engineers for the construction of a e
trans-oceanic canal, later built in Panama. During the final
negotiations for the transfer of the Panama Canal, the Torrijos
regime was especially insistent that the treaties include an a
prohi bition against any third country building another canal.

The Nicaraguans maintain that Torrijos is obsessed with the fear
that the U.S. might try to build another canal'in another Central
American nation like Nicaragua, almost 500 miles closer to U.S
ports.

Dr. Roger Fontaine maintained in his June 5, 1979, Mutual
interview that Panamanian cooperation with the Sandinistas to
overthrow Somoza in Nicaragua casts doubt on the faith placed in
Torrijos by the Carter Administration. One critical issue is
whether the Panama Canal would be run efficiently and kept open to
world commerce as it was when it was operated by the United States
under the 1903 treaty. The Latin American scholar said he foresaw
real short-term operational problems and predicted the U.S. fa ces
a very serious crisis with Panamanian operation of the Canal under
the treaties signed by President Carter.

A Soviet-Cuban-Panamanian alliance against Nicaragua, there
fore, conforms to the little-discussed grand global design of the
Soviets to dominat e the waterways of the world as a way to deny
the United States access to vital trade routes. In fact, in the
immediate aftermath of the January 1964 riots in Panama that paved
the way for negotiations to give up the waterway, the then military
affairs ed i tor of the New York Times, Hanson Baldwin wrote that
Soviet strategic policy has always been keyed to control of both
the sea and waterways of the world. .Baldwin maintained that the
Soviets in 1964 had embarked on a rigorous expansion of their
merchant a n d naval fleets, outstripping the United States in this
area over the last 15 years. As far back as the 1919 Paris Peace
Conference at the end of World War I Lenin had instructed his
Soviet representatives at the conference I, I 9 to demand that
Western Po wers agree to neutralization of the waterways, including
the Suez and Panama Canals.

Strategy to Overthrow Nicaragua The military overthrow of
President Salvador Allende produced a series of extensive
congressional investigations into the clandestine opera tions of
the Central Intelligence Agency in Chile, alleging abuses of its
powers while President Richard M.

Nixon was in office. Such investigations, combined with the
Watergate Affair, provided the 1976 presidential campaign with a
powerful set of issues for then candidate Jimmy Carter. However the
investigations, according to William Colby, former CIA director
severely damaged the ability of the CIA to conduct future opera
tions, as illustrated by the intelligence failure of the CIA in
Iran during 1978 H owever, no similar congressional investigations
have been launched that would determine the'strategic consequences
of the application of a one-sided human rights policy, which
General Sumner and others maintain produced the current bloody
fighting in Nica ragua. The extensive evidence might be summarized
as follows In its first 12 months, the Carter Administration
success fully moved to cut off all U.S. economic and military aid
to.

Nicaragua while advancing a program of better relations with
Cuba and urged the Congress to approve turning over to General
Torrijos the vital inter-oceanic waterway that the Soviets have
always regarded as a strategic prize. Dr. Roger Fontaine asserted
in a September 3, 1978 Mutual Broadcasting interview that the
Carter Adminis t ration's ignoring of human rights violations under
the Torrijos and Castro dictatorship is the result of a bias
against anti-Marxist regimes in the human rights section of the
State Department The allegations of human rights violations by
Nicaragua have t urned out, on close investigation, to be the
result of clashes between the Nicaraguan National Guard and the
Sandinista guerillas.

The same problem was faced by the United States in Vietnam the
celebrated Mylai massacre in which a young U.S. Army officer w as
confronted with guerrilla groups using the civilian population as
part of their strategy to overthrow an existing government. The
Carter Administration, liberal members of Congress and radical
Catholic groups alleging human rights violations have consi s tent
ly placed the blame on the Nicaraguan government, while ignoring
the part played by terrorists in the killing of innocent civilians
caught between guerrillas and government forces The cutoff of U.S.
economic and military aid to Nicaragua weakened tha t nation's
ability to resist the kind of Marxist terrorist activity that the
Carter Administration has consistently I 10 claimed it opposes A
similar step was taken in 1958 against the pro-U.S. Batista regime
in Cuba, leading to, Castro's seizure of power The end.of aid,
according to General Sumner and other strategic thinkers,
encouraged the Sandinistas to launch an offensive of substantial
size in August and September of 1978.

During this period, .when seven Nicaraguan cities suffered
severe damage becaus e of fighting the U.S according to Congressmen
Murphy and Charles Wilson (D-Tex went out of its way to under mine
the Nicaraguan government by holding up a sizable loan Nicaragua
was entitled to from the International Monetary Fund IMF Insisting
in public that it was seeking a peaceful solution to the September
1978 crisis, the Carter State Department pri vately pressured
President Somoza to resign, citing his govern ment, not the
Sandinistas, as the cause of the violence and bloodshed. As
subsequent event s in the current crisis have shown, the Carter
Administration appears to have adopted a policy early in 1977 of
seeking to destablize Nicaragua, thus forcing President Somozals
ouster on much the same grounds that forced out the Shah of Iran.
In a Mutual B r oadcasting interview on October 1, 1978, President
Somoza charged openly that Panama Costa Rica, Mexico and Venezuela
plotted in a meeting with Presi dent Carter, who was in Panama to
sign the Panama Canal Treaties to bring down his constitutionally
elect e d government. There fore, in a unprecedented charge by one
head of state against another, President Somoza implied that the
President of the United States may have been a part of this
strategy. The Somoza charge was to be given substantial credibility
whe n Secretary of State Cyrus Vance openly demanded at a meeting
of the Organ ization of American States in Washington on June 21,
1979, that President Somoza resign and be replaced by a coalition
government of national reconciliation that would include the M a
rxist dominated Sandinistas The Vance-Carter action was
rationalized on the grounds that President Somozals resignation
would forestall the possibility of Castro turning Nicaragua into
another Cuba. Somoza's removal was mandatory, according to the
Carter A dministration, because of his record on human rights. At
another OAS meeting in Washington four days after his return from
Panama in June 1978, President Carter gave an impassioned plea for
human rights, pledging that his Administration would. not be dete r
red from pursuing violations of human rights. Yet, on the following
day, according to the United Press International of June 22, 1978,
Secretary of State Vance ordered the U.S. Ambassador at the OAS to
back away from support of a OAS resolution calling fo r
investigation of human rights violations in Cuba I held by Castro
is his former fighting comrade, non-communist I One of the most
famous of-the thousands of political prisoners Huber Matos, who has
been in solitary confinement for almost 19 years. Senato r Daniel
Moynihan D-NY) joined with 40 members of 11 the U.S. Senate in
April 1979, asking the Carter Administration to seek Matos'
release. Moynihan, in a speech on the Senate floor on June 18,
1979, said that after two months the Carter Administration ha s
failed to make a public statement demanding that Castro release
Matos. This was three days before Secretary Vance demanded in the
OAS that President Somoza resign and pave the way for the very kind
of coalition government that was subvert ed by Castro in 19

59. Since 1959, many Cuban democrats who joined in overthrowing
Batista have fled Cuba for their lives or have had the misfortune
to spend almost two decades in one of Castro's prisons.

Nicaraquans: The New Boat People In the last twenty years,
Cubans have fled by the thousands in small boats, much as
Vietnamese are today fleeing in boats only to find no Asian nation
will accept their large numbers.

However,'the Vietnamese are more fortunate than. the almost one
million Cambodians who were murdered in an unprecedented genocide
after the communists took over in that Southeast Asian nation.

In Cuba, Vietnam and Cambodia the fate of these countries was
clearly forecast when the United State s withdrew its support and
refused to resist Marxist terrorist guerrilla groups Do these three
grim and bloody examples suggest that the thousands who support the
Somoza regime may become the new wave of refugees of this
hemisphere? The conduct of the.San dinistas over the last few years
suggests an answer.

The American-born Bishop of Bluefields for the Eastern
Nicaraguan province of Zelaya is Reverend Salvadore Schlaefer, head
of the American branch of the Capuchin Catholic missionary order in
Nicaragua, w hich has been the source of almost all of the
allegations of human rights violations by the Nicaraguan govern
ment transmitted to both the press and various human rights
commissions. He conceded in a Mututal Broadcasting interview on
September 21, 1977, t h at on two occasions the Sandinistas shot
Nicaraguan peasants who had informed the Nicaraguan army of their
hideouts. The Nicaraguan government has insisted, moreover, that
such killings have been standard practice, adding that the Sandi
nistas often stole army uniforms and then murdered i.nnocent
civilians, blaming the killings on Somoza's army. It was such
incidents that Capuchin missionaries in Nicaragua used as testimony
to indict the Somoza regime as brutal, sadistic and repressive.

Most of the interna tional news media refused to believe the
Nicaraguan government. However, a series of incidents provide
support of this assertion. For example, when the Sandinistas seized
the National Palace in Managua in August 1978, the guerril las
first gained entrance to the government offices dressed in
Nicaraguan National Guard uniforms. During the holding of some
1,500 hostages, the rooms where the hostages were being held were
12 rigged with explosives ready to explode in'the event of any
rescue attempt. During the follow-up Sandinista seizure of part of
seven Nicaraguan cities in September of 1978, reports began
circulating that National Guardsmen had committed atrocities
against young Nicaraguans in cities like Leon. The charges were
widely circulated in a series o f stories written by Washington
Post correspondent Karen DeYoung. However, in a Mutual Broad
casting interview on September 20, 1978, retired Nicaraguan
National Guard General Roger Bermudez said that his farm outside
Managua had been burglarized and the o nly things that were taken
were a truck, hunting rifles and his old uniforms. Similar reports
had been circulating during the September 1978 Sandinista siege,
told by guard reserve officers and enlisted men told his story from
a Miami hospital bed that an eye witness account of the
Sandinistas' use of Guard uniforms could be documen ted. According
to Lesavoy, in an interview in the Miami Herald of September 14,
1978, he was in Managua on business when, during the fighting in
the city, he pulled up behind a another car halted by what he first
thought were government Guardsmen.

Instead, they turned out to be Sandinistas wearing red and black
masks to hide their faces. According.to the American businessman,
the Sandinistas not only fired indiscriminately into houses and
firebombed others, but they fired into the car ahead of him.
Seizing him from his auto, the Sandinistas told Lesavoy to run and
then riddled his legs with automatic weapons fire.

Lesavoy maintains that had not the real Nicaraguan National
Guard appeared as the Sandinistas were prepared to shoot him in the
back of the head, he would not be alive to tell this story It was
not until American textile manufacturer Lester Lesavoy At roughly
the same time that Lesavoy was severely wounded by the Sandi n
istas in Managua, Washinqton Post reporter Karen DeYoung wrote a
series of articles of how the Guard had, in Leon seized 14 young
men and murdered them in cold blood. The Nicara guan Catholic
Church denounced the alleged atrocities while the U.S. State De p
artment issued a statement on September 21, 1978 quoted by the
United Press International, calling for President Somoza to
.discipline his forces. DeYoung quotes the families of the young
victims as insisting they were killed by Nicaraguan Guardsmen. Resi
d ents of Leon, however, interviewed by Mutual Broadcasting on
September 23, 1978, offered a significant piece of information,
which while it does not prove that Sandinistas dressed in Guard
uniforms murdered the young residents of Leon does cast doubt on t
h e accuracy of DeYoung's widely-circulated atrocity stories. Leon
residents said that what enraged them more than anything else was
how hardcore Marxist guerillas who initially seized Leon pulled out
and left the Sandinistas' young supporters at the peak o f the
conflict to face a heavily armed Guard. Mutual Broadcasting
interviews in San Jose, Costa Rica five days earlier revealed that
the real strategy of the Sandinis tas in September of 1978 was not
to overthrow Somoza; this they knew was impossible at th e time.
The major goal of the September 13 I 1978 offensive was to cause
destruction and discredit the Nicara guan National Guard with the
people. Significantly, the stories that Somoza forces were
committing atrocities had first surfaced in the Costa Rica n
Communist Party press prior to the publication of DeYoung's
account..

What went totally unreported by the U.S. news media was what the
Sandinistas did to the northern Nicaraguan farming community of
Esteli ten days prior to the alleged atrocity stories r eported by
DeYoung. The news media reported only that Esteli suffered severe
damage after 11 days of fighting, implying that the Guard had to
destroy the town to take it back. However, in a Mutual Broadcasting
interview on September 24, 1978, the Chief of Staff of the
Nicaraguan National Guard, General Armando Fernandez (who 30,000
insisted that the Sandinistas attacked Esteli in full strength on
September 10, 1979 at 4:30 Sunday morning in three groups, the
first attacked the local garrison, a second fire bombed the central
marketplace and downtown business sector and a third, with a
pre-selected list of names, machine-gunned their I officer, said
that the brutality of the killing shocked even him.

Neither Karen DeYoung of the Washinqton Post, the Nicaragu an
Catholic Church nor the U.S. State Departjnent expressed any
concern about what the Sandinistas did to Esteli. However President
Somoza, in a Mutual Broadcasting interview on October 1, 1978,
insisted that the strategy of the Sandanistas was to I I too k part
in the 11 days of savage fighting for the town of I victims in
their beds. General Fernadez, a seasoned.military I make an-example
of Esteli as a wa&ng to the rest of the country what would
happen if they resisted "liberation.'I Yet, when an Organiz a tion
of American States team visited Nicaragua in mid October, its
report placed all the blame for the destruction bloodshed and death
on the Nicaraguan government. On October 15 1978, the Archbishop of
Managua, a long time political foe of Somoza, pleade d for the OAS
team to stay in the country to pre vent a Somoza bloodbath. Five
days after that statement, the Mexican Daily newspaper Excelsior
published a communique from the Sandinistas admitting what they had
done in Esteli, including the terror murders that General Fernandez
had earlier alleged.

When ABC-TV newsman Bill Stewart was murdered by a National.

Guardsman in Managua during the savage street fighting in June
1979, the news media, the Carter Administration and the State
Department were properly outraged at this brutal act. Stewart's
death was used as an illustration of the brutality of Somoza's
soldiers. However, Novedades editor Luis Pallais pointed out in an
interview on May 31, 1979, 10 days prior to Stewart's landing in
Nicaragua, that two of his reporters had been murdered by the
Sandinistas. The U.S. news media, the Carter Administration and the
Nicaraguan Catholic Church expressed no moral outrage.

Similarly, when the Reuters News Service reported on June 25,
1979, that the Sandinistas ha d executed six men by firing 14 squad
because'they were supporters of the government, no outcry arose.
This was roughly during the time when the Costa Rican and
Panamanian governments recognized the Sandinistas provisional
government and after the U.S. op e nly called for President Somoza
to resign. Four days after this ,unprecedented move, me United
Press International reported that Sandinistas had admitted execut
ing 130 of Somoza's supporters in Matagalpa, a city north of the
capital. The New York Times a n d Washington Post, responsible for
a steady stream of critical articles of the Somoza government over
a two-year period, did not choose to share the information with
their readers. Nor did either newspaper bother to publish a June
28, 1979 pair of Associa ted Press and United Press Interna tional
stories confirming the existence of a secret CIA Intelli gence
report that Cuban arms were flown to Liberia, Costa Rica on
Panamanian air force planes for use by the Sandinistas.

However, the Washington Post of'Jul y 1, 1979, did report that,
under State Department pressure, Israel had suspended arms
shipments to Nicaragua. The israelis had been supplying military
hardware to the Somoza government because of the help and support
Nicaragua gave Israel during the.Jewi s h state's struggles in the
1940s. This aid included letters of credit, use of Nicaragua's
diplomatic network to purchase arms, and support for Israel in the
United Nations since 1948 Consequences of a Marxist Nicaragua The
Carter Administration has' rejec t ed President Somoza's calls for
honoring the mutual defense treaty with the United States and also
rejected his offer to resign if the Carter Admin istration will
provide economic reconstruction aid and offer solid guarantees that
it will not permit the C u ban-trained and supplied Sandinistas.to
establish a Marxist-Leninist dictator ship. This inflexible
unwillingness, combined with an encourage ment of policies that
have helped produce the current bloodshed and instability in
Central America, is in rude co n trast to the Carter
Administration's persistent desire for settling disputes by
peaceful means, its longstanding policy of dialogue with the
Soviets and anti-American Third World nations, and its stated
opposition to terrorism as an instrument for effecti n g change
throughout the globe. Therefore, maintaining such an inflexible
posture in Nicaragua may have as far reaching consequences for this
hemisphere as Administration miscalculations have already had in
the Persian Gulf, the Middle East and Africa. Suc h conse quences
may be summarized as follows.

U.S. aid in forcing out President Somoza most certainly means
that no non-Marxist nation will, particularly after the American
failure in Iran ever again trust the United States or the
agreements and treaties it signs with non-Marxist states.

Nor is it li kely that any nation in this hemisphere or
elsewhere will ever maintain opposition to Marxism on the scale of
the 15 Nicaraguans. In all probabilty, nations within and without
the hemisphere will choose to accommodate to what they perceive as
the inevitab le rise of the Soviets as a world power and the
decline of the U.S. if the U.S. is unwilling to directly meet a
challenge to its strategic interests on its own doorstep.

Success in ousting Somoza by a combination of U.S. pressure and
Marxist military suppo rt, transparently hidden behind a
smokescreen of human rights violations by radical religious and a
secular political organization allied with Marxist terrorists and
accepted uncritically by an international news media, provides a
formula for use against other anti-Marxist nations.

The ouster of President Somoza without U.S. guarantees that it
will not permit a Marxist takeover in Nicaragua means that the
13,000-man National Guard will be leaderless and unable to resist
the military campaign waged by the M arxists with Panamanian Cuban,
and, in a sub rosa fashion, Soviet help. The Sandinistas have
already said publicly and have demonstrated by their'actions over
the last few years that the establishment of a People's Army will
also mean the execution of man y of President Somoza's suppor ters.
In a Reporter's Roundup interview on Mutual Broadcasting of July 1,
1979, President Somoza insisted that if the Sandinistas took over
he expects 50,000 Nicaraguans to be murdered in a bloodbath that
would make Iran look like a Sunday picnic.

The U.S; Qill face a strategic peril to its soft Central
American underbelly with a pro-Marxist government in Panama
threatening the transit of trade and oil. The current military
dictatorship has already demonstrated it will not kee p its word
and, if the U.S. Congress should agree to finalize transfer of the
Canal, there are no assurances that the Panamanians will not seek
to engage in blackmail, threatening to close the waterway if the
U.S. seeks to act to protect its vital interes t s in the
hemisphere at a future date A Marxist Nicaragua.to the north of
democratic and free Costa Rica and a pro-Marxist Panama to the
south, offers little hope that the tiny Central American nation
would maintain its long-standing independence, particul a rly in
view of the Soviet presence. The subversion and takeover in other
Central American nations would mean a Marxist Central America from
Panama in the south to Guatemala in the north. Mexico, therefore,
would come under Marxist pressure to deny its vas t oil reserves to
the U.S in much the same way pressure is being applied by the
Soviets on Saudi Arabia and other oil-rich states in the Persian
Gulf CONCLUSION Nicaragua and U.S. policy toward that former friend
and ally might be viewed as the Czechoslova k ia of our time. It is
now 16 forgotten that British Prime Minister Chamberlain sought to
appease Hitler not because Chamberlain was evil and cowardly, but
because Britain had allowed its strategic position, politically
economically and militarily, to decl ine during the great global
depression of the 1930s. In short, the British under Chamberlain
refused to tell their own people the truth that it did not have the
moral will and physical resources to keep its commitments.

A similar situation now confronts th e United States and helps
explain why the last three Administrations have adopted what can
only be termed a New Appeasement policy toward Soviet global
challenges. This is starkly revealed not just in terms of nuclear
strategic forces, but in terms of the decline of U.S naval and
conventional power while the Soviets have substantially increased
nuclear, naval and conventional forces to U.S. dis advantage.
Rather than candidly tell the American people the truth, that the
U.S. no longer has the military capa b ility to match the Soviets,
a confession that would contradict past assur ances and doubtless
cause a widespread public storm of anger and indignation,
Washington political leaders have pursued a policy of detente with
the Russians over the last decade th at is in reality the
acceptance of Soviet-inflicted defeat without the benefit of a
war.

Winston Churchill, after Chamberlain's return from Munich in
1939, rose in the House of Commons and stated the real consequences
of what the British Prime Minister had done. His assessment fits
our current'position We have suffered a great defeat without a war,
the conse quences of which will travel far with us And do not
suppose that this is the end. This is only the beginning of the
reckoning.

I Prepared at the reque st of The Heritage Foundation by Jeffrey
St. John Jeffrey St. John is a Mutual Network news commentator
syndicated columnist and the author of several published works
including The Panama Canal and Soviet Imperialism: War for the
World Waterways, publishe d by The Heritage Foundation in January
19

78. He is also the author of a forthcoming .work, Human Rights
Revolution and the Crisis of Reliqion.